# The field notebook that becomes citable — nTilia

> nTilia Markdown editor: a field ecologist notes offline, declares an abstract and co-authors, deposits on Zenodo and gets a DOI. Zotero in one click. A notebook that outlives the tool.

Canonical: https://ntilia.com/en/research

I'm an ecologist. Three campaigns a year on a wetland, a waterlogged Rhodia notebook and, once home, six months before anything becomes a document a colleague can cite. I don't want to publish my science on a blog. I want my field observations to live where I took them, in a form a journal, Zotero or a student in 2036 can read.

Scenario. The screens are nTilia's; the campaign, counts and co-authors are invented for the example. No real DOI was minted for this story.

## A project, not one more folder

In Settings I pick the Research profile. My missions are now called projects; the Academic style is suggested and I keep it. I create “Hippo monitoring 2026” and attach my protocols in Markdown. Nothing is public yet: it's my notebook, on my phone, synced privately whenever there's a network.

## Offline, GPS masked, the note still gets written

No network on the pond, as expected. I log the counts, two photos, a voice clip for the juvenile numbers I have no time to type. Every take keeps its position — but sensitive-field mode masks it by default on anything public: the exact location of a protected species never leaves the notebook. The counts table, meanwhile, will number itself in the article.

## One abstract, two co-authors, three ORCIDs

I turn the campaign summary into a publishable note. In the inspector I write the abstract — five sentences: question, site, method, take-away. I add Awa and Mariam as co-authors: name, ORCID, affiliation, role in the field. Footnotes and the density formulas go in as-is. The abstract heads the article and flows into JATS, RIS and the ScholarlyArticle JSON-LD without me touching anything.

## Deposit on Zenodo: one click, a PDF, a Markdown file, a DOI

The article is published under CC BY 4.0. From the editor menu: Deposit on Zenodo. nTilia renders the preprint PDF — title, authors, affiliations, abstract, licence — and sends it with the Markdown source to CERN's archive. Thirty seconds later the DOI is there: in the frontmatter, under Cite, in BibTeX and RIS. It won't move, even if I fix a typo tomorrow.

## Cited by someone I've never met

A PhD student in Ouagadougou found the note through Google Scholar — the Highwire tags and the ScholarlyArticle did the work. He dropped it into Zotero in one click, RIS with all three authors. The PDF he cites is Zenodo's, not a screenshot. And if nTilia ever disappears, the DOI still resolves to that copy, and my notebook is still a folder of Markdown files I can export as a ZIP whenever I want.

## Why nTilia

nTilia replaces neither the journal nor the institutional repository. It's the field notebook that, once reviewed, becomes citable: offline, GPS masked, declared abstract and co-authors, Zenodo DOI, Zotero in one click, ORCID everywhere.

## What outlives you — and what outlives us

Your notes are open Markdown files with readable frontmatter. A project exports as a ZIP at any time, takes and protocols included. The PDF and Markdown deposited on Zenodo belong to CERN's archive, not to nTilia: the DOI keeps resolving if this site shuts down. It's the only honest promise a tool can make.

## What a researcher asks first

**Is the DOI a real DOI?**  
Yes. It is minted by Zenodo, CERN’s open archive, with the 10.5281 prefix. The preprint PDF and Markdown source are kept there independently of nTilia; the DOI keeps resolving if this site closes. One deposit per article in v1; the DOI is frozen with the matching public version.

**Do Zotero and Google Scholar read my articles?**  
Zotero: while writing, import a local Better CSL JSON / BibTeX file and type [@citekey]; at publish, RIS and JATS buttons on every article, with all co-authors, the abstract and the DOI. Google Scholar: Highwire tags (citation_title, citation_author, citation_doi, citation_pdf_url) and ScholarlyArticle JSON-LD. Search-engine indexing is on from Pro; a Free journal stays unindexed.

**How do I declare co-authors and an ORCID?**  
In the editor inspector, Research group: name, ORCID, affiliation and role for each co-author; your own account ORCID is set in Settings → Journal. Everything lives in the article’s Markdown frontmatter, readable without nTilia, and flows into the byline, JATS, RIS, BibTeX, JSON-LD and Zenodo creators.

**Can I write formulas and footnotes?**  
Yes, on every plan: GFM footnotes [^1] and KaTeX math inline ($…$) or block ($$…$$), rendered server-side in the article, preview, RSS feed and PDF, with no third-party script.

**What happens to my notebook if nTilia disappears?**  
Your notes are Markdown files with frontmatter; a project exports as a ZIP at any time, takes and protocols included. Zenodo deposits belong to CERN’s archive, not to nTilia. Nothing that matters is locked inside the tool.